My usual escapes don't seem to be giving me enough escapism? The fantasy world inside my head seems unusually quiet. The hours seem to be taking hours instead of racing past in a few minutes when I look up. It's kind of sobering.
It's a weird feeling suddenly wanting to get up and start the day, seeing things that need to be done and doing them. The self-efficacy of oh look a thing that needs doing, huh, guess I can do it after all.
And it is just so much easier to get up and do things when there's nobody there to watch and judge and comment on my every single action.
I went outside during the day by myself for the first time in weeks. Need to build up the muscles in my legs again after my fall last November. My knee still isn't quite right but I think if I did some exercises I can get back to a more functional level of fitness. Reminds me of when I first started dating my ex and he struggled to walk even a mile without hurting himself. Kind of astonishing that I've never managed to become that atrophied. Perhaps I'm just lucky not to be quite as injury prone.
It was freezing outside, but sunny. I hung my washing on the line around the back and everything. The skin on my hands is becoming horrible with eczema, probably due to the weather.
I started a fucking sewing project, decided to repair the holes in some old jeans that somehow still fit me. It's talking longer than I originally thought, but I got overconfident because I did a small patch on my boilersuit earlier in the week and thought I was ready to graduate onto giant rips. I don't even own a shitting sewing machine I've been doing it all by hand like a silly billy.
These last couple of days have made me aware of how isolated I have become. It normally doesn't bother me at all because that's how inside my own head I've been. I felt like I couldn't manage anything or be reliable to anybody. Like I just needed a really really long rest.
People are important to me and that's one of my core beliefs. I have skills and energy that I'm sure could be put to use somewhere. I can be a helpful person. Why has it taken me so long to realise this.
A little part of me is scared that I will forget this and sink back into my mental ether. Like I will lose my energy again, and that's why I'm writing this really. In the past, I would forget all of my good days so I always tried to make a written record so that even if my mood faded there was evidence that it happened, and I would desperately scramble to try and make as many decisions as I could while my brain was still working.
I'm trying to resist doing that right now because I want to believe in my future self. Today was good and it was bad, bittersweet. It's not that my brain fog has miraculously cleared for a temporary reprieve. I have been slowly working on this the entire time, trying to reimagine myself as a person with a future. All of the adjustments and accommodations I have made because of my traumas are smothering and killing me.
It's like I got the safety settings on my mental firewall turned up to 9000 and I have subsequently rendered myself incapable. Very safe from repeating past experiences. But unwilling to keep living and participating in my own life.
When we wall off the painful and unpleasant we live a half, incomplete life. When we have no hope and no dreams, living seems impossible. Just to be clear, I have no desire to die, but I wasn't alive either.
I didn't believe in my own ability to change my own circumstances. I just constantly struggled and failed to complete menial tasks, and it was completely vexing. I could see the trajectory and I was unwilling and unable to change it because I had no hope, I had nothing that I wanted, I didn't know what I liked or who I was. So much of myself was hidden to me, because my brain was keeping it hidden, keeping me safe. I was trying to find a way to keep moving through the world when the world felt so unsafe, when I felt so uncertain and insecure.
Still stuck in my head: Ghosting by Mother Mother
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAhUScrPC7Y
Reading: Renegades by Marissa Meyer
https://www.marissameyer.com/renegades-series/
Film: Confessions of a Shopaholic
